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Comment by hggigg | Hacker News Reader

That's not even the problem I encounter. They literally crap out on stupidly simple tasks. Recent ones:

1. Bing was gaslighting me into 9.11 being greater than 9.9

2. ChatGPT said that 7x7/7+7/7+7/7 was 24.

3. When expanding (x+1)^2 the output was 2x^2+2.

Regardless of any level of interpretation and irrelevant information if it can't deterministically understand correctness and the semantics of the operations in question then it's fucking useless.

What is worse in an educational context is that it is actively harmful.

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Most average humans can’t do any of these things either. Try asking people on the street. Or in an average US college student.

For deterministic calculations you obviously want to allow LLMs to use tools to do math. Just like you’d want to allow humans to use calculators.

So yeah, you shouldn’t ask LLMs to do math just like you shouldn’t ask average people to do math. They both suck at it.

So, what exactly is the point of the LLM if it can't exceed an average person and produces results which are not trustworthy?

"The average person" has a job. Those jobs can now be performed by machine. The societal implications are profound.

If those jobs consisted of solving small isolated puzzles and math questions you'd maybe have a point.

The societal impact so far has been mostly increasing noise (generating irrelevant content you have to filter out) and burning resources.

Fundamentally AI models need a better way to learn and use memory if they want to replace entry level human jobs - RAG and fine tuning ain't it.

The "average Person" which struggles with the given questions probably has a physical work job though.

I think it's necessary to remember that they're not a general artificial intelligence, but language models. For example, they're pretty good (not perfect) at translating things, including translating arbitrary instructions into code or machine-readable forms.

Seriously? those are pretty simple HS math questions, I find it a bit hard to believe most average people cant solve them. Don't most people graduate HS?

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